JOBS Act

He’s not saying he plans a huge Bulldog Investors billboard on the Mass. Pike, big enough for Bill Galvin to see if from his front stoop in Brighton every morning. But if Uncle Phil were into that kind of thing, now he could.

When was the last time you took a second look at your student loans? If you’re like most borrowers, you probably try hard not to think about them. After all, dwelling on your debt isn’t going to make it go away any faster. Or is it?

A good rule of thumb is never to reason from an acronym but here’s this Bloomberg article about how Dan Loeb’s Third Point Reinsurance is making use of the JOBS Act in its IPO even though it creates no JOBS in America so hahaha irony. It’s not entirely clear what Third Point Re is doing […]

We don’t make the law, folks, we just help you follow it. Comply with your regulatory requirements right here. Or I guess you could read Dan Primack’s summary of the SEC’s vote to allow general solicitations for private placements, but don’t take him too seriously when he says “Issuers do not need to generally solicit. […]

Here’s sort of a pleasing paper on equity research analysts. The background is basically that there’s this constellation of questions that reduce to “do public markets make companies Bad?,” and one of the main mechanisms by which that might happen would be if markets make companies focus on short-term earnings and shareholder distributions rather than […]

There’s a great story in the Journal this morning about how the JOBS Act, which allows small new public companies to do various lazy things in their financial reporting, actually isn’t having that effect, because the companies hold themselves to a higher standard. Here is a representative passage: Thanks to the law, Vienna, Va.-based software […]

The SEC had a feisty week last week, telling off Congress with cheery abandon. Darrell Issa sent them a pretty crazy letter a few months back demanding that all IPOs be Dutch auctions for some reason, and last week Mary Schapiro sent him a deeply researched 32-page letter telling him, with appropriate condescension, that that […]

You are doing that aren’t you? Now you have no excuse if they’re not perfect: Ms. Schapiro, in prepared testimony before a panel of the U.S. House oversight committee, said that the SEC would not meet a July 4 deadline set by Congress to complete the rules lifting the longstanding ban on publicizing private securities […]

We’ve talked a little before about how I don’t understand Wall Street research. Let’s start slow: why publish research? There are I think three, or three-ish, possibilities: 1. To inform your investing clients (asset managers and such) about your best views on how they should manage their money, so that they can manage their money […]

My time in the financial industry entirely postdated the global research settlement, which means that I have a different view of sell-side research from some of the olds. As far as I can make out, there are people who think that investment bank research was once a demonic scheme in which research analysts – larger-than-life figures whose recommendations were irresistible to the retail investors who in this vision bought all of every pre-2003 stock offering – swindled those besotted retail investors into buying crap stocks at inflated prices so that the banks could get gigantic investment banking fees. Whereas I always thought that investment bank research was a sort of cute endeavor of unclear commercial purpose, taken skeptically by the institutional investors who buy most of every post-2003 offering, made fun of by bankers, and conducted by people whom we never saw because, among other things, our network was set up to prevent them from emailing us and vice versa.

Perhaps before the settlement giants roamed the halls of research divisions, defrauding investors with abandon, but once their email was cut off from the bankers’ email they retreated into mousy irrelevance? Unclear. In any case THEY’RE BACK BABY, sort of:

President Barack Obama’s securities-law rollback known as the Jobs Act, expected to be signed into law next month, also contains a provision that would lift the ban on the marketing of private funds, potentially giving hedge funds, private-equity funds and others greater freedom in marketing their offerings to the public, industry attorneys said.

Currently, private funds are allowed only to market to a small group of investors: those with whom they have pre-existing, “substantive” relationships. Under the bill, hedge funds could start sponsoring sporting events and begin advertising their funds in print, the lawyers said.

The shift is “significant” and could provide a boost to small hedge funds trying to raise capital but that lack brand-name recognition or wide contacts, says Steve Nadel, a hedge-fund lawyer with Seward & Kissel LLP in New York; larger, more established firms sometimes have investors waiting to invest.

The Journal goes on to talk about the free speech aspect of this, and I did that too, so yay, now you can tell strangers how awesome your hedge fund is, AND OF COURSE YOU WILL DO JUST THAT, and you probably are already and are surprised to learn that it’s illegal*? Also, and more importantly, soon you will be able to give people money to induce them to tell strangers on the internet how awesome your hedge fund is, so, y’know, consider giving us some of that money, because we like money.

There’s this thing called the JOBS Act that would basically make it easier for small or smallish companies to raise money by giving investors unaudited financials or not having internal controls or just lying to them on the Internet, which is my racket. I’ve enjoyed reading people really ripping into it*, like Simon Johnson, whose […]

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Mar 20, 2012 at 7:38 PM

SAC

Mary Jo White was the top federal prosecutor in New York City during Bill Bratton’s first run as the Big Apple’s top cop, and she learned a few lessons from his “broken windows” theory: Clean a place up a little, and throw the fucking book at the street urchins who are messing things up with […]